What the Heck is a Ground Stop?

In the midst of the chaos following the explosions at the Boston Marathon yesterday, word came out that Boston's Logan Airport had been put under a ground stop. What does that mean? Brett Snyder explains what a ground stop is and when it is issued.

In the midst of the chaos following the explosions at the Boston Marathon yesterday, word came out that Boston's Logan Airport had been put under a ground stop. That sounds bad, but is it? No. In fact, a ground stop is something that happens fairly often and, in this case, had nothing to do with any suspected security issues at the airport or on an airplane.

First, let's start with the basics. What is a ground stop? It's an order issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) whenever they need to freeze operations. It requires that flights scheduled to land at the affected airport be held at their departure point.

In this case, the ground stop for Logan was issued for about 20 minutes. But this wasn't even for all flights. Only flights departing from the northeast U.S. and Canada were held.

So what was the problem? Were there suspicious packages? Shady characters? Serious intelligence concerns? According to the airport, the FAA changed the runways in use at the airport, so they put a halt to departing flights to give the airport the ability to redirect traffic.

Why did they change the runways? Well, there was a no-fly area declared over parts of Boston, as a precaution after the explosions. So the airport had to use different runways in order to prevent arriving and departing aircraft from breaching that area.

That was it. And just so you understand how common this order is, the Boston ground stop wasn't the only one issued yesterday. There was one later in the day at O'Hare. Why? Some secret terrorist plot? No. There was a thunderstorm sitting over the airport, so they had to stop flights until it passed. And Denver had one last night due to snow and ice. In fact, a ground stop is going on right now across all American flights, as the airline tries to fix its crashed computer system (airlines and airports can request ground stops and delays, but it's ultimately the FAA that issues them).

Of course, ground stops can be issued for real security reasons.This morning someone got overly suspicious about wiring sticking out of a light at LaGuardia, and authorities needed to evacuate the terminal—so a ground stop went into effect.

For more info on both ground stops and delays, head on over to http://www.fly.faa.gov/ and you can see the current status at every airport in the U.S. If you watch it long enough, you might be surprised at how often these happen.